James T’ien, the Leonard Case Jr. Professor of Engineering in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, has been elected to the inaugural class of fellows of the Combustion Institute.

As dedicated members of the international combustion community, the 125 elected fellows are recognized by their peers as distinguished for outstanding contributions to combustion, whether it be in research or in applications.

T’ien was recognized for excellent research on the effects of gravity on flames and its application to spacecraft fire safety.

Will Huddleston, a materials science and engineering graduate student, won a student poster contest at the American Ceramic Society’s Electronic Materials and Applications Conference in January with a poster titled, “Freeze casting of LAGP for 3D textured solid-state structural electrolytes.”

Huddleston works with the Case School of Engineering’s Electroceramics Group, a lab led by Alp Sehirlioglu, the Warren E. Rupp Assistant Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, that studies the processing-structure-property relationships in electronic ceramics with applications in energy conversion storage materials and 2-D behavior.

Biomedical engineers at Case Western Reserve University are growing tracheas by coaxing cells to form three distinct tissue types after assembling them into a tube structure—without relying on scaffolding strategies currently being investigated by other groups.

Successful trials and further research and development could someday allow surgeons the option of replacing a damaged or faulty trachea with a fully functional natural-tissue trachea in both adults and children, said Eben Alsberg, professor in biomedical engineering and orthopaedic surgery and director of the Alsberg Stem Cell & Engineered Novel Therapeutics Lab at Case Western Reserve University.

It is widely accepted that the Earth’s inner core formed about a billion years ago when a solid, super-hot iron nugget spontaneously began to crystallize inside a 4,200-mile-wide ball of liquid metal at the planet’s center.

One problem: That’s not possible—or, at least, has never been easily explained—according to a new paper published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters from a team of scientists at Case Western Reserve University.